LinkedIn Explains How It Finds Audiences For Your Posts & Filters Out The Low Quality Stuff

Earlier this year, LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform to everyone, enabling people to post content beyond simple status updates and links. You may be wondering who's actually seeing your posts.

According to LinkedIn, members who have published at least one article on the company's publishing platform have an average of 1,049 1st degree connections and 42 followers.

LinkedIn Engineering Manager Byron Ma, who heads up the platform publishing team, wrote a blog post about how it distributes such posts to people. In short, there are three ways: feeds, 1st degree network notifications, and Pulse Email.

It also talks about how LinkedIn filters out low quality and spam articles. Ma explains, "The publishing service is integrated with LinkedIn’s Unified Content Filtering (UCF) Service, a client side library which provides information such as an article's spam score and confidence scores for how likely an article is to be a job posting or an event promotion. If the scores exceed a particular threshold, they will not be distributed to the author’s network. UCF also provides the publishing service with information indicating whether the publishing member is blocked by another member. The returned content filtering result is then stored in publishing platform's domain and is integrated to our rest.li APIs for clients to access."

Ma further tells us by email, "Other than obvious spam, we are leveraging existing content classifiers to identify unwanted jobs, promotional material and event invites. All of these classifiers power the low quality filter and are backed by data models."

"The UCF service is a super block for content blocking which retrieves and merges results from a variety of things such as different content classifiers and the member to member blocking service," he says. "The idea is for all members to use UCF rather than calling individual classifiers/blocking services."

Check out the post for a great deal more detail about how LinkedIn distributes content through its various channels.